The Villa Vie Odyssey residential cruise ship suspended its multi-year voyage, leaving passengers stranded in Cambodia.
Villa Vie Residences cited sharply rising fuel costs as the reason for discontinuing the cruise.
The company had previously asked residents for loans and donations to continue operating before halting the trip.
Lynn and Paul Montoya were told they had to leave their home this week, but they couldn’t drive to a friend’s house or go stay with family. The couple was docked in Cambodia during a continuous voyage aboard the residential cruise ship Villa Vie Odyssey when the crew announced that passengers had to disembark because the ship would discontinue its voyage.
They weren’t told how long they’d be gone, so the pair packed around two weeks’ worth of clothing, vitamins and medications, leaving the rest behind.
“It’s our home, so it would kind of be like trying to pack up your whole home in seven hours,” Lynn, 64, told USA TODAY.
Villa Vie Residences, the company behind the cruise, suspended operations, citing high fuel costs in an Oct. 27 news release.
“Fuel costs have risen sharply in the regions where the company has been operating,” Villa Vie said in the release. “On an equivalent per-cabin basis, monthly fuel expense that historically averaged approximately $1,800 has recently reached an estimated $6,000 to $8,000 in parts of Asia. The company cannot simply pass increases of that scale on to residents, and the resulting shortfall has placed its current operating model under unsustainable financial pressure.”
The Montoyas, who sold their home in Wyoming to spend their retirement on the ship, are among many residents suddenly without a place to live as their years-long trek was cut short by nearly half.
“We’re technically homeless right now,” Lynn said.
‘It blew up in my face’
Starr Davis had already left the ship by the time it stopped sailing. The 58-year-old decided to do her own land tour around Southeast Asia, return to the U.S. to see family, and meet back up with the vessel in Phuket. “And it blew up in my face,” she said.
She said it wasn’t a total shock.
Villa Vie’s journey had a bumpy start. The Odyssey began its planned 3½-year cruise – with the intent to circumnavigate the globe every 3½ years – in October 2024 after multiple delays.
The voyage was originally set to start in May of that year, but faced setbacks as its planned departure approached.
Villa Vie founder Mike Petterson told USA TODAY in August 2024 that the company had “been quite humbled by the scale of what it takes to reactivate a 30-year-old vessel from a four-year layup. After the lapse of all certifications of class, we are now considered (a) new ship where all machinery and equipment must work as if new.” The Odyssey previously sailed as MS Braemar for Fred Olsen Cruise Lines before Villa Vie purchased it in 2023.
Davis, who previously lived in Florida and retired shortly before the trip began, said it had largely gone smoothly since the vessel set sail.
In spring 2026, however, the company asked residents to commit to one-year loans with interest paid back monthly, according to Paul Montoya, 68. He estimated that he and Lynn loaned Villa Vie $100,000, but said they have not yet received any repayment.
During a late July meeting with ship management, the company told residents that it needed to raise around $1.5 million to continue operating, according to Davis. Passengers made donations, including Davis, who declined to give specific figures but said it was a “very minuscule” amount.
Around the same time, Villa Vie announced plans to expand its fleet with a second ship, noting that more than 85% of Odyssey’s available residences had been sold.
The Montoyas, who have documented their trip on their YouTube channel, initially paid $179,000 for their cabin, along with about $6,000 in monthly maintenance fees. Davis chose a pay-as-you-go option for her cabin, though she declined to share how much it cost. Neither the Montoyas nor Davis has learned whether passengers will receive refunds.
According to the most recent figures on Villa Vie’s website, permanent residency started at between $119,999 and $439,999, depending on the room type, with five-year-residency and rental options also available.
“I mean, all of us drank the Kool-Aid enough to want to keep it going,” Davis said. “There was hope for an investor to come on board and take over and save us. But literally, it was just, do you want to shut the lights out now, or do you want to make a donation to keep going?”
In the weeks that followed the July meeting, she noticed that the ship was lingering longer in ports and appeared to be bunkering fuel less frequently. Villa Vie noted in the news release that it had spent more time in port in an effort to reduce fuel usage, among other steps.
Onboard supplies seemed to be dwindling, too. “We’d kind of joke that we were getting slim pickings as far as the buffet went,” Davis said. “So you could definitely see that everything was reduced.”
More “cash calls” followed, including one as the ship approached Hạ Long Bay in Vietnam. “They’re like, oops, we can’t afford to dock here. We need to raise $159,000 in order to dock,” she recalled. “People gave that money. They were doing creative fundraising.”
Paul Montoya said the ship typically carried around 300 residents, but that it had lost “more and more people that just were not certain that it was going to go on” in recent months.
Petterson told CBS News this week that the company plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The Montoyas are staying in a hotel in Sihanoukville and plan to travel to Phnom Penh and Kuala Lumpur while they await answers about the Odyssey’s fate. Passengers may return to the ship during certain hours, but the couple has not yet returned.
Villa Vie said in the news release that it was working to find temporary living arrangements for passengers while assessing options for restructuring and recapitalization. The company did not immediately respond to inquiries about the Montoyas’ or Davis’ experiences.
Davis brought two suitcases with her “most important” items when she left, and doesn’t know when or if she’ll be able to get the rest of her belongings from the Odyssey. However, after downsizing from an 1,800-square-foot apartment to a roughly 120-square-foot cabin, she said, “One of the big lessons I’ve learned is that things aren’t as important as you think they are.”
She plans to fly back to the U.S. in the coming days and figure out her next steps from there. Despite the abrupt halt, she’s grateful for her travels to more than 60 countries over the past couple of years.
“That is pretty phenomenal, and what an amazing adventure,” Davis said. “So you know, I hate that this is the way it ended, but if this is the end, I really and truly can’t complain.”
Nathan Diller is a consumer travel reporter for USA TODAY based in Nashville. You can reach him at ndiller@usatoday.com.

Rivian (RIVN) just released its Q3 2026 earnings, with revenue up 38% year-over-year to $2.155 billion. The R2, in its first full quarter of deliveries, is already the company’s best-selling vehicle, ahead of both the R1 and the Amazon van.
The results beat Wall Street’s expectations, and Rivian is raising its 2026 guidance on every metric. But the car business is still losing money, and the R2 ramp made the automotive margin worse this quarter.
Rivian Q3 2026 by the numbers
We already had the volume side. Rivian reported earlier this month that it built 19,751 vehicles and delivered 19,248 in the quarter, both records. Deliveries were up 46% from a year ago and 58% from Q2.
Here’s the rest of the quarter:
Advertisement – scroll for more content
Revenue: $2.155 billion (+38% YoY)
Automotive revenue: $1.550 billion (+36%)
Software and services revenue: $605 million (+45%)
Gross profit: $176 million (8% margin)
Adjusted EBITDA: -$435 million (vs. -$602 million a year ago)
Net loss: -$913 million
Adjusted EPS: -$0.48
Free cash flow: -$1.124 billion
Cash and short-term investments: $5.502 billion
Analysts were looking for about $2.02 billion in revenue, an adjusted loss of $0.61 per share, and an adjusted EBITDA loss of roughly $576 million, according to Bloomberg consensus. Rivian beat all three.
The R2 is selling, but the cars still lose money
The demand signals for the R2 are good. Rivian says reservation conversion for the launch edition trim stayed above its expectations, it added a second R2 production shift in Normal, Illinois, and demo drives jumped to over 103,000 in the quarter, up from 57,000 in Q2.
The problem is the automotive gross margin. Rivian’s automotive segment posted an $80 million gross loss in Q3, a -5% margin. That’s better than the $130 million loss a year ago, but worse than the $36 million loss (-3%) we saw in Q2.
Rivian blames about $120 million of extra cost of revenue on the R2 ramp, compared to production at “more normalized levels.” And the quarter got help that won’t repeat on demand: $81 million in regulatory credit revenue and an IEEPA tariff refund receivable.
Strip out the credits and the automotive segment lost about $161 million at the gross level, or roughly $8,400 per vehicle delivered. Not great.
But there’s real progress under that. Rivian says automotive cost of goods sold per unit fell by more than $12,000 quarter-over-quarter thanks to the higher R2 mix and better fixed-cost leverage. Our own math from the filing puts it at about $84,700 per vehicle in Q3, down from $96,700 in Q2. Revenue per vehicle is coming down too, which is the point of a cheaper car: about $76,300 excluding credits, versus $85,000 in Q2.
Volkswagen is carrying the gross profit
The only reason Rivian posted a consolidated gross profit is its software and services segment, which brought in $605 million in revenue and $256 million in gross profit, a 42% margin.
Of that segment revenue, $354 million (59%) came from the joint venture with Volkswagen Group, which pays Rivian for electrical architecture and software development work. Rivian says it expects to recognize that revenue through about mid-2028. Autonomy+, the paid driver-assist package launched in April, is also in there, and Rivian says take rates are “trending ahead of our expectations.”
Guidance goes up, capex comes down
Rivian updated its 2026 outlook:
Deliveries: 67,000 to 70,000 (from 65,000 to 70,000)
Adjusted EBITDA: -$1.85 billion to -$1.75 billion (improved by $100 million at the midpoint)
Capital expenditures: $1.40 billion to $1.50 billion (down $300 million at the midpoint)
With 41,807 deliveries through September, Rivian needs between 25,193 and 28,193 in Q4 to land in the new range. That would be another record by a wide margin. Rivian is providing this guidance a month into the quarter, which gives strong confidence it will hit at leat the lower end of that target.
The capex cut is about “timing of spend,” not savings. Phase 1 of the Georgia plant, which is supposed to add 300,000 units of annual capacity for R2 and R3, is still under construction.
On cash, Rivian ended the quarter with $5.502 billion, or $7.095 billion in total liquidity once you add its credit facility and the $1 billion term loan Volkswagen funded in October. That’s after the $1.5 billion share sale in July. Free cash flow was -$1.124 billion in Q3 alone.
On autonomy, Rivian still plans a limited rollout of “Point to Point” driving through an invitation-only early access program later this year, with a general release to Autonomy+ subscribers in 2027. It also says an Uber milestone expected by year-end would unlock another $250 million equity investment. More details are promised at its Autonomy and AI Day on December 9.
Electrek’s Take
This is a good quarter for Rivian, and the R2 is clearly working. Becoming the best-selling Rivian within one full quarter, while the ramp is still early, is about as good a start as you could ask for. We saw the R2 roll off the line in April, and the demand side has held up since.
But be careful with the headline beat. A lot of it came from outside the car business: Volkswagen’s checks, regulatory credits, and a one-time tariff refund. The thing Rivian actually builds and sells lost more money at the gross level than it did last quarter.
The number we care about most is the $12,000 drop in cost per vehicle. If that keeps going as the second shift fills and the $120 million in ramp costs fade, the automotive segment can get to breakeven on its own. If it stalls, Rivian is a software contractor for VW with a money-losing car company attached.
I am betting on the former. With a shift added right before the quarter started, production will likely increase significantly in Q4, and Rivian already has strong visibility into demand a month into the quarter.
If anything, I’m impressed by the demand Rivian is seeing for the more expensive launch edition of the R2. It bodes well for the cheaper version, as long as it manages to get its cost down over the coming months.

Reddit has long attracted millions of users to its site through Google, with many even appending the word “Reddit” to their search queries for better answers. But as search traffic dries up amid the shift to AI-powered search, Reddit is rethinking its relationship with the open internet. In its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the company announced it’s transitioning to a primarily “logged-in experience.”
The move is designed to protect its data from AI scraping, allowing the company to instead forge lucrative licensing deals with model providers. But just as important, such a shift could help Reddit to increase its revenue even as it faces daily active user declines in its largest market, the U.S.
Overall, Reddit’s global daily active users were flat quarter-over-quarter in Q3, reaching 130.3 million, while U.S. daily active users dropped from 53.2 million in Q2 to 50.7 million in Q3 and were down 2% year-over-year.
The company is not alone in seeing such declines; the shift to an AI-centered web has impacted most websites and publishers by now, leading to fewer click-throughs, as AI summaries provide answers that don’t require website visits and Google’s traditional “ten blue links” have reduced relevance. (The change is now even impacting Google’s bottom line, its earnings revealed.)
But at Reddit’s scale, the numbers associated with such a decline are enormous. The company said search traffic referrals dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week in October. It warned that if the trend continues, daily active users could decline to a low-double-digit percentage by next quarter. (To play that out: a hypothetical 10% to 12% decline could bring Reddit to roughly 115 million to 117 million daily actives, down from 130.3 million in Q3. That’s a huge drop!)
At the same time, Reddit has gotten significantly better at monetizing its audience even as its growth weakens. Revenue increased 53% year-over-year to $895 million, ahead of Wall Street’s expectations of about $875 million. Net income rose 74% to $283 million. Advertising revenue grew 54% to $847 million while nonadvertising revenue, which includes its AI data-licensing business, grew 35% year-over-year to $48 million.
And despite a 2% year-over-year decline in U.S. daily users, Reddit’s average revenue per daily active user in the U.S. rose 53% to $13.82. Globally, average revenue per daily active user increased 36% year-over-year to $6.87.
Shifting to a logged-in experience could boost those numbers even higher because logged-in users are typically worth more to advertisers.
Unlike the logged-out users who often find their way to the site via search, logged-in users provide more signals about their interests and behaviors, which helps to better target and personalize ads.
Those same signals would also help Reddit provide a more personalized experience to its users, which includes personalized feeds, recommendations of new communities to subscribe to, and pushes to vote, comment, participate, and more. (This also includes pushing recommendations to its new algorithmic “For You” feed, announced yesterday, which will combine posts from communities users belong to alongside other recommendations based on their interests.)
Still, a change of this magnitude could be the canary in the coal mine for the open web.
“I don’t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it’s a big change for me,” wrote Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman in a post published on Reddit’s site. “But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business,” he said.
The company notes that the shift to the logged-in experience will not be an overnight change; it will first run tests in select markets outside the U.S. in the fourth quarter. It doesn’t yet have a timeline for when the change will be rolled out to all its users worldwide. It also acknowledged that access to a logged-out front page is important.
Plus, Reddit pointed out that being logged in doesn’t mean having to give up anonymity, nor will it remove its option to browse anonymously through its “incognito mode” experience, which is being rebuilt.
“There are still plenty of questions that are unanswered, particularly around where the boundaries should be between logged-in and logged-out experiences,” Hoffman wrote. “This is a big evolution for Reddit, and not one we’re taking lightly. But I believe it’s the right next step for the platform and for our future.”

Intel shares plummeted in extended trading on Thursday after the chipmaker issued a weak fourth-quarter forecast, citing continued softness in the global PC market.
Here’s how the company did in the third quarter, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:
Earnings per share: 52 cents adjusted vs. 40 cents expected
Revenue: $16.51 billion vs. $16.5 billion expected
Revenue climbed 21% from $13.7 billion a year earlier, the company said in a press release.
However, revenue in Intel’s client computing and physical AI group fell 5% from the same quarter a year ago to $8.1 billion, missing estimates, even as data center and AI revenue jumped 78% to $7.3 billion.
Global PC shipments declined 4% in the second quarter from a year earlier due to soaring costs for memory and other components, according to Counterpoint Research.
For the current quarter, Intel said it expects adjusted earnings per share of 25 cents on revenue between $15 billion and $16 billion. Analysts were expecting revenue of $17.1 billion and EPS of 43 cents, according to LSEG.
“We see the PC slowdown continuing at least through the first half of next year, but we remain optimistic about the opportunities across our broader portfolio,” said Intel finance chief David Zinsner, in the release. “We will continue making disciplined investments in capacity and working capital to increase supply and support future growth.”
Additionally, Intel’s forecast reflects the effects of an explosion at a fab in Israel that killed two workers and seriously injured a third earlier this month. Zinsner told Reuters that the incident will cost the company about $600 million in lost revenue over two quarters, and said the company plans to start ramping up production there by the end of the week.
Intel’s stock has been on an upward tear, up about 150% so far this year, although it’s down roughly 23% in October as concerns have emerged about the size of the artificial intelligence buildout.
Known best for its industry leading central processing units, or CPUs, Intel has been a beneficiary of the rise in agentic AI. While chatbots and large models rely heavily on graphics processors from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices , agentic applications such as Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots lean on CPUs to help orchestrate tasks and data from a computer operating in the cloud.
“Despite near term headwinds affecting the broader PC industry, we continue to see robust demand for CPUs and more broadly, for all our computing platforms in the long term,” CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in the press release.
Nvidia, which has become the world’s most valuable company thanks to its dominance in GPUs, is scheduled to report results on mid-November. AMD reports next week.
Intel’s foundry business, meanwhile, has struggled to find its footing.
Intel is the only U.S.-based manufacturer of advanced logic chips, and is now in high-volume production of its most advanced 18A chip out of its new fab in Arizona, providing an alternative to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
While Intel remains the only major customer of the chip, analysts say a major fabless chip customer could choose Intel with its next chip, 14A.
“People want a second source to be able to twist TSMC’s arm and keep them honest on pricing,” said TechInsights analyst Dan Hutcheson. “All the big ones have been testing there.”
On top of the memory shortages, another critical component of chipmaking known as substrates “are really constrained,” Intel’s Zinsner said in August.
The Trump administration took a 10% stake in the Intel last year after the company had fallen behind on its 7- and 10-nanometer technologies. Nvidia and Softbank also invested billions in Intel last year.
Tan has taken a more cautious approach to foundry spending than his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, who launched an ambitious revival of the company’s foundry business.
Last week, Intel said crews have installed the first structural truss at its huge Ohio chip fab that was originally expected to deliver chips in 2025. Its next fab in Arizona is expected to begin operations by the end of 2028.
Oracle disclosed an expanded deal with Intel this week, announcing at its annual AI conference that it would deploy the chipmaker’s next-generation Xeon server processors, as well as the latest rack-scale systems from Nvidia and AMD, as it continues to add data center capacity.
Intel completed a $23 billion equity offering in August. Tech giants have spent trillions of dollars in recent years to meet insatiable demand for AI and the infrastructure needed to support it.
WATCH: Can Intel’s New Arizona Chip Fab Bring It Back From The Brink?

Rivian Automotive beat Wall Street’s third-quarter earnings expectations as it ramped up production of its new R2 entry-level SUV that the company has promised investors will lead the company to profitability.
Here’s how Rivian performed in the period ended Sept. 30, compared with average estimates compiled by LSEG:
Loss per share: 48 cents adjusted vs. loss of 62 cents expected
Revenue: $2.16 billion vs. $1.99 billion expected
Shares of Rivian were up roughly 5% during afterhours trading Thursday, after hitting a new 52-week low of $11.38 earlier in the day. The stock closed at $11.45 a share, down 1.9%
The electric vehicle maker also revised its 2026 guidance to mark expected improvements in its vehicle deliveries, pre-tax adjusted earnings and capital expenditures.
The new guidance calls for a pre-tax adjusted loss of between $1.75 billion and $1.85 billion — a $100 million improvement at the midpoint from its prior guidance — vehicle deliveries of between 67,000 and 70,000 units, up from at least 65,000; and capital expenditures of between $1.4 billion and $1.5 billion, $300 million less at the midpoint.
Rivian attributed the improvement in its pre-tax adjusted earnings guidance to better-than-expected revenue related to its sales of regulatory credits, an IEEPA tariff refund receivable in the third quarter and its expected increase in vehicle deliveries.
The R2 — the first deliveries of which arrived to customers in June — has become Rivian’s best-selling model and was responsible for “much of the gain quarter-over-quarter,” the company said.
Rivian delivered a record 19,248 units from July through September.
The EV maker remains unprofitable overall but continued to narrow its losses during the quarter. The company reported a net loss attributable to common stockholders of $913 million, compared with a loss of $1.17 billion during the third quarter of 2025.
Rivian’s gross profit, which is closely monitored by investors, was $176 million during the third quarter, up from $24 million a year earlier. Its adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization was a loss of $435 million, a $167 million improvement from the same period last year.
The company reported that its software and services segment continues to grow, generating $605 million in revenue and a gross profit of $256 million, a 42% margin. That compares to its automotive operations, which recorded nearly $1.55 billion in revenue and a gross loss of $80 million.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe has said the company will reach profitability this year on a per-unit production basis with the R2, a smaller and less expensive sibling to its current luxury R1S SUV. But he said the company needs to scale beyond current R2 production plans of 160,000 units in order to achieve profitability.
Scaringe said Thursday that the R2 will continue to assist with the company’s gross profit.
“That ramp-up is critical for us getting to positive gross margin on R2 and that ultimately will contribute to positive gross margin for the business,” he told CNBC’s Phil LeBeau during an interview.
Rivian on Thursday reconfirmed its cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments balance was $5.5 billion, up from $5.3 billion to end the second quarter.